Subject: File Number S7-33-10: Whistleblower Award Program

December 7, 2010

Dear Ms. Murphy

I just signed a petition saying:

"More whistleblowing about corporate crimes could have made the foreclosure crisis and economic meltdown less severe. Whistleblowers should never be forced or engouraged to take their concerns to their potentially corrupt bosses first: Those who go directly to the government deserve the strongest rewards and protections allowed by law."

Requiring whistleblowers to check in with their employers would result in *more* anonymous document dumps, not less! At least if they go through the government, what gets to the press can be somewhat filtered so as to hold the company responsible without as much collateral damage in terms of jobs held by the rank and file employees. If they have to go through their bosses first, they're just going to dump a bunch of documents anonymously on the Internet (Wikileaks is not the only place to do this... ), potentially torpedoing the company in the process. The banks don't seem to realize this, but this proposed rule would remove the option of a surgical strike, and instead leave a nuclear bomb as the only realistic one remaining to would-be-whistleblowers. Please protect the banks and the economy from their own stupidity by protecting whistleblowers.